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Everyone who is interested in popular taste and popular journal-ism in the United States should be delighted by this book. It is the first study ever made of the American story papers of the nineteenth century. The story papers were not quite magazines and not quite newspapers; consequently, they have been ne-glected by the historians of both these categories. The story pa-pers were published weekly; they specialized in thrilling fiction and uplifting articles; they avoided political controversy and de-fended the sanctity of the home against all comers; and they were read by millions who got from them the kind of entertain-ment that comes now from soap opera and the movies. The peak of the story paper age was reached in the 1870’s, when Street & Smith’s New York Weekly was running Bertha, The Sewing Machine Girl, or, Death at the Wheel. Today we are likely to think of Bertha as a tearful and much-abused girl; it is reassuring to learn from Miss Noel that the original Bertha was full of fight and responded to danger in true American fashion. When the boss’s son made insinuating remarks to Bertha she really told him off: Beast! villain! coward! are you so idiotic as to suppose your promises would have a feather’s weight with me, even if you were the perfection of manly beauty and loaded down with wealth, instead of the vain, empty-headed, hollow-hearted disgusting fright that you are? I am a poor working-girl, obliged to toil late and early for a mere subsistence, but I con-sider myself as far above you as heaven is above the earth.
